Preliminary material -- SUMMARY OF THE SOURCES -- THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND EPIGRAPHIC SOURCES -- THE LITERARY SOURCES -- THE GODDESS -- THE WORSHIPPERS -- THE PROPAGATION OF THE CULT -- THE GODDESS AND HER CULT -- FINDINGS FOR THE CULT BASED ON THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL REMAINS COMPARED WITH OTHER DATA -- GENERAL INDEX -- EPIGRAPHICAL INDEX -- LITERARY INDEX -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS OF THE PLATES -- Plates I-LII and 5 maps.

Bona Dea, also known as Fauna, was a very important goddess of female initiations in Rome, and several features of hers were shared by similar goddesses in ancient Italy. This book sheds light on two hitherto unexplored features: the Dionysiac character and the Lydian style of her festivals. The wife of a consul took on the attitude and the attire of Omphale as the president of Dionysiac ceremonies. Faunus was supposed to precede Bacchus and give fecundity to the bride (i.e. Ariadne), whereas Hercules was thought of as an effeminate musician who created harmony. This was the correct ritual behaviour of prenuptial ceremonies, as it was depicted on many Dionysiac sarcophagi. The iconography of these monuments depicts important features of Faunus and Fauna. Believers are depicted on sarcophagi in the attitude of Bacchus or, in case of women, of either Ariadne or Omphale. A final comparison with initiations among native tribes of Oceania clarifies many rituals of the ancients.

Countless years after the destruction of Earth, the last survivors of humankind struggle for survival in the distant colony of Bona Dea. Young psychic Axandra is the matriarch of the colony, and host to a powerful entity known only as the Goddess. Trying to protect the people she loves but reluctant to host the Goddess, Axandra struggles with her fate. After discovering that she's being used as a pawn between factions, Axandra begins to suspect a plot against her. But behind the scenes, an even greater power is at play, and soon the future of the whole colony is at stake.

The role of women in Roman culture and society was a paradoxical one. On the one hand they enjoyed social, material and financial independence and on the other hand they were denied basic constitutional rights. Roman history is not short of powerful female figures, such as Agrippina and Livia, yet their power stemmed from their associations with great men and was not officially recognised. Ariadne Staples' book examines how women in Rome were perceived both by themselves and by men through women's participation in Roman religion, as Roman religious ritual provided the single public arena where women played a significant formal role. From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins argues that the ritual roles played out by women were vital in defining them sexually and that these sexually defined categories spilled over into other aspects of Roman culture, including political activity. Ariadne Staples provides an arresting and original analysis of the role of women in Roman society, which challenges traditionally held views and provokes further questions.

A fascinating exploration of women’s role in Roman religion that facilitates a better understanding of their importance in Rome’s cultural formation. Roman women were the procreators and nurturers of life, both in the domestic world of the family and in the larger sphere of the state. Although deterred from participating in most aspects of public life, women played an essential role in public religious ceremonies, taking part in rituals designed to ensure the fecundity and success of the agricultural cycle on which Roman society depended. Thus religion is a key area for understanding the contributions of women to Roman society and their importance beyond their homes and families. In this book, Sarolta A. Takács offers a sweeping overview of Roman women’s roles and functions in religion and, by extension, in Rome’s history and culture from the republic through the empire. She begins with the religious calendar and the various festivals in which women played a significant role. She then examines major female deities and cults, including the Sibyl, Mater Magna, Isis, and the Vestal Virgins, to show how conservative Roman society adopted and integrated Greek culture into its mythic history, artistic expressions, and religion. Takács’s discussion of the Bona Dea Festival of 62 BCE and of the Bacchantes, female worshippers of the god Bacchus or Dionysus, reveals how women could also jeopardize Rome’s existence by stepping out of their assigned roles. Takács’s examination of the provincial female flaminate and the Matres/Matronae demonstrates how women served to bind imperial Rome and its provinces into a cohesive society.

How does the treatment of women's rituals in Latin poetry and prose reveal Roman ideas of female agency? Powerful female characters pervade both Greek and Latin literature, even if their presence is largely dictated by the narratives of men. Feminist approaches to the study of women in Greek literature have helped illustrate the importance of their religious and ritual roles in public life—Latin literature, however, has not been subject to similar scrutiny. In Brides, Mourners, Bacchae, Vassiliki Panoussi takes up the challenge, exploring women's place in weddings, funerals, Bacchic rites, and women-only rituals. Panoussi probes the multifaceted ways women were able to exercise influence, even power, in ancient Rome from the days of the late Republic to Flavian times. Systematically investigating both poetry and prose, Panoussi covers a wide variety of genres, from lyric poetry (Catullus), epic (Ovid, Lucan, Valerius, Statius), elegy (Propertius, Ovid), and tragedy (Seneca) to historiography (Livy) and the novel (Petronius). The first large-scale analysis of this body of evidence from a feminist perspective, the book makes a compelling case that female ritual was an important lens through which Roman authors explored the problems of women's agency, subjectivity, civic identity, and self-expression. By focusing on the fruitful intersection of gender and religion, the book elucidates not only the importance of female religious experience in Rome but also the complexity of ideological processes affecting Roman ideas about gender, sexuality, family, and society. Brides, Mourners, Bacchae will be of value to scholars of classics and ancient religions, as well as anyone interested in the study of gender in antiquity or the connection between religion and ideology.

A Place at the Altar illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, Meghan DiLuzio emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods. Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community’s well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, they were assisted by female cult personnel, many of them slave women. DiLuzio explores the central role of the Vestal Virgins and shows that they occupied just one type of priestly office open to women. Some priestesses, including the flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, and the wives of the curial priests, served as part of priestly couples. Others, such as the priestesses of Ceres and Fortuna Muliebris, were largely autonomous. A Place at the Altar offers a fresh understanding of how the women of ancient Rome played a leading role in public cult.

This book attempts to come to grips with a set of widely ranging but connected problems concerning myths: their relation to folktales on the one hand, to rituals on the other; the validity and scope of the structuralist theory of myth; the range of possible mythical functions; the effects of developed social institutions and literacy; the character and meaning of ancient Near-Eastern myths and their influence on Greece; the special forms taken by Greek myths and their involvement with rational modes of thought; the status of myths as expressions of the unconscious, as allied with dreams, as universal symbols, or as accidents of primarily narrative aims. Almost none of these problems has been convincingly handled, even in a provisional way, up to the present, and this failure has vitiated not only such few general discussions as exist of the nature, meanings and functions of myths but also, in many cases, the detailed assessment of individual myths of different cultures. The need for a coherent treatment of these and related problems, and one that is not concerned simply to propagate a particular universalistic theory, seems undeniable. How far the present book will satisfactorily fill such a need remains to be seen. At least it makes a beginning, even if in doing so it risks the criticism of being neither fish nor fowl. Sociologists and folklorists may find it, from their specialized viewpoints, a little simplistic in places; and a few classical colleagues will not forgive me for straying far beyond Greek myths, even though these can hardly be understood in isolation or solely in the light of studies in cult and ritual. Others may find it less easy than anthropologists, sociologists, historians of thought or students of French and English literature to accept the relevance of Levi-Strauss to some of these matters; but his theory contains the one important new idea in this field since Freud, it is complicated and largely untested, and it demands careful attention from anyone attempting a broad understanding of the subject. The beliefs of Freud and Jung, on the other hand, are a more familiar element in the situation and have given rise to an enormous secondary literature, much of it arbitrary and some of it absurd. The author has tried to isolate the crucial ideas and subject them to a pointed, if too brief, critique; so too with those of Ernst Cassirer.

The Roman elegiac poet Propertius was one such author. This final published collection, issued in 16 BCE, has been traditionally read as an abandonment by Propertius of his earlier flippant love poems for a more mature engagement with Roman public life or else a comical send-up of imperial policies as embodied in Rome's public buildings. The Elegiac Cityscape explores Propertius' Rome and the various ways his poetry about the city illuminates the dynamic relationship between one individual and his environment. The relationship between poet and city is complicated at every turn by the presence in the background of the emperor Augustus, whose sustained artistic patronage of Roman monuments brought about the most pervasive transformation that the city had yet seen. Combining the approaches of archaeology and literary criticism, Tara S. Welch examines how Propertius' poems on Roman places scrutinize the monumentalization of various ideological positions in Rome, as they poke and prod Rome's monuments to see what further meanings they might admit. The result is a poetic book rife with different perspectives on the eternal city, perspectives that often call into question any sleepy or complacent adherence to Rome's traditional values. Book jacket.

When a sacret woman's rite in the ancient city of Rome is infiltrated by a corrupt patrician dressed in female garb, it falls to Senator Decuis Caecilius Metellus the Younger, whose investigative skills have proven indispensable in the past, to unmask the perpetrators. When four brutal slayings follow, Decius enlists the help a notorious and dangerous criminal. Together, they establish a connection between the sacrilege and the murders, and track the offenders from the lowest dregs of society to the prominent elite of the upper class, finding corruption and violence where Decius least expects it.